Friday, April 11, 2008

With Friends Like These...

Call it "guilt by association" if you like, but some voters are wisely asking questions about the company Sen. Barack Obama chooses to keep. Yes, it's true that similar questions haven't been asked about other candidates, like John McCain for example, but with good reason:

Most people running for president have actually DONE something.

Since Barack Obama has never had a significant private sector job, has never run a business, has never been an executive, has served in national government for less than three years and avoided 120 key votes during his brief service in the state legislature, it's hard to evaluate him on his non-existent record.

So voters are stuck evaluating the public choices he has made, and then calculating what sort of president he would make.

Our friend Andy McCarthy has a great piece today about the people Sen. Obama has chosen to embrace and their attitudes about America: Rev. Wright (of course), his wife Michelle (ditto), but also some folks that you probably haven't heard much about:

"...is it really all that startling that Sen. Obama enjoys a friendly relationship with Bill Ayres and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, a pair of terrorists? I want to be clear here:

Not terrorist sympathizers. Terrorists.

The mainstream media, in their zeal to elect a Democrat, are assiduously airbrushing Ayres: “an aging lefty with a foolish past,” as the Chicago Sun-Times has so delicately put it. In fact, it is the press that is rife with foolish, aging lefties. Ayres, by contrast, is an unapologetic terrorist with a savage past...Ayres didn’t just carry a sign outside the Pentagon on May 19, 1972. He bombed it.

As his memoir gleefully recalled, 'Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon. The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.' Whether Pentagon bombing day was more or less ideal than other days, when he, Dohrn and their Weathermen comrades bombed the U.S. Capitol, the State Department, and sundry banks, police stations and courthouses, Ayres does not say. But on each occasion, there was surely optimism that the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.

There were lots of bombs. There is no remorse. 'I don’t regret setting bombs,' he told the New York Times in 2001, sorry only that he and the others “didn’t do enough.” Like what? We can’t be sure, though National Review Online’s Jonah Goldberg recounts Ayres’s sentiments back in the day: 'Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.' "